Defining Mercury I

Or: An Exercise (Possibly in Futility) For Saturn Transits To Mercury....

I wrote this back in January during the first pass of Saturn to natal Mercury. Finding myself tongue- tied now on the second pass, I thought it might be worth revisiting. Part two following.

I've gone quiet of late. Saturn is squaring my Sun, Mercury and Nodes and I've been slowed  right down, caused to think much about who and what I am, where I'm going and how I express myself.

In fact self expression, communication, writing, and words seem to have been major themes. I have Mercury in Aquarius and I think very fast, read very fast, and when inspired, have been known to talk so fast I forget what it was I was trying to say in the first place, and end up stuttering or stopping.  Often when I write, I cannot type or access the words fast enough to express the notion with which my mind is running. Zap, zap, zap.

Now the beauty of this is that the ego is often forced aside and great inspiration can appear as if from nowhere. New ideas and frequencies come unbidden through the Uranian mind working at it's highest, these being the realms in which knowledge and understanding can suddenly leap an octave and the human story begin a new chapter.

What this may lead to at the low end, though, is a style of communication that grabs at the nearest, easiest word or phrase. Linguistic fast food, if you like. The tool that gets the job done fastest. And platitudes become the norm. Which detaches the user from the warmth of human connection.

I remember a few years ago picking up a copy of Little Dorrit in a second hand bookshop. I hadn't read Dickens for years, and never that particular story so thought I'd give it a go. And I was stunned by the beauty of the language. Not so much the descriptive language, but the words that were coming out of the characters mouths. I would read lines over and over, immersing myself in the joy of it. The complexity and variety of the words and the way they were crafted. And the fact that people actually used to speak like this.

Consider our ways of speaking today. Some teenagers don't seem to possess the ability to communicate at all outside of text speak. Not only is most language fast, easy and purely functional (if that) the idea that words are a beautiful thing, to be explored, examined, played with, crafted,  in order to convey emotion, passion and the inspiration of the gods, is anathema to many people. WTF dude?

So all this begs the question; what is language, and what is its purpose?